Germany's Nuclear Fumble
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Either way: we should stop mooning over a bygone love, there are plenty of other fish in the sea.
You’ve presented precious little technical evidence to support such an absolute statement. Perhaps instead a nuclear engineer would be in a better position to make such an assessment, although I don’t know of one who would be unprofessional enough to make such a blunt statement without some supporting analysis. Assuming the infrastructure is still in place, it seems likely some reasonable effort could be made to restart a technology that was working perfectly well in Germany in, let’s see, January 2022.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/correction-ge...
“overprovisioning goes a far way already”
Your blind faith in the scalability of renewables in a cloudy, not-very-windy country such as, say, Germany is touching, but unsupported by any analysis. Perhaps a power engineer should be consulted. Much sunnier, windier countries haven’t gone all in on renewables and instead have chosen a robust diverse energy technology portfolio. Perhaps they are wiser. Seems so in April 2022.
“Power can be moved…” from countries who weren’t foolish enough to make technical and economic decisions based on ideology in the first place and thus have electricity to offer to, say, Germany. Not the first time ideology took precedence over common sense in Germany’s history.
“stop mooning over a bygone love”…what an oddly romantic metaphor for nuclear power. “Your lovely face highlighted by the blue glow of Cherenkov Radiation…”. It was German politics that rejected nuclear power, not economics or national security or engineering or public safety. Nothing romantic about that, nor anything romantic about Germany changing its political mind on the matter as the situation warrants. I trust the abilities of German engineers more than the intelligence and integrity of German politicians. History strongly supports such an assessment.
Overprovisioning by how much? The installed capacity is over 60GW for wind and a bit under 60 GW for solar. This morning at 6 am, wind produced 3.9GW (6% of capacity) and solar 0.6GW (1%). At the same time, fossils produced 30GW and nuclear 4GW.
A single data point at 6am doesn't tell much, neither does one at 15.24.
How can you take an article like this seriously? No one builds wind farms and expects them to run 24/7.
The author cites an article on "wind droughts" and ignores that these go hand in hand with rising temperatures and droughts. Rivers getting warmer and dryer is very bad for nuclear power plants, but if you write a biased article, you don't have to mention this.
The quote that nuclear energy could replace "30 percent of the Russian gas" is also completely off.
Then the author claims the Energiewende ended Germany's "energy sovereignty". No sources. Germany has been steadily decreasing fossil fuels, increasing renewables - I'd like to see a justification for this claim. How is not relying on Russian uranium worse for your energy sovereignty?
It mentions rising electricity prices and now I'm quoting the IEEE source for that claim:
> The average cost of electricity for German households has doubled since 2000. By 2019, households had to pay 34 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 22 cents per kilowatt-hour in France and 13 cents in the United States.
The consumer price comparison is pointless because Germany taxes electricity heavily. They should compare production cost. Germany is only slightly above Euro-zone average (which you can explain away with higher purchasing power) and only slightly more expensive than France, which makes me believe these people are just measuring inflation and don't want to admit it.
So we have one source where these effects (that go hand in hand) cause them to only be usable 36% of the time while with another source they can still be used 80% of the time?
That is not true? I mean, I’m glad they linked to their sources, but already that link (which then references the YouGov poll that’s the primary source) only says "About half of Germans say nuclear energy should remain an option in climate policy" which is very different from re-enabling old nuclear plants.
That coupled with mentioning NS2 without NS1 or the existing transit pipelines leaves quite the taste.
I'm not sure how they decided it would be a better idea to switch off nuclear before switching off their coal fired electric plants.
Refurbishing those ancient nukes would steal money budgeted to putting up wind turbines. The wind turbine projects are adding generating capacity at a gangbuster pace that could not be matched patching up those ramshackle old contraptions.
Now they're replacing nuclear with coal and renewables, which seems completely bonkers.
From what I can tell fossil fuels aren't reliable either because you have to import them. They also tend to fail in winter.
https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/breaking-it-down-vict...
On some days you have so much overproduction that electricity is practically free and on others the price will go insanely high.
We still need a reliable base load - and Nuclear is the only one of those that can be constructed pretty much everywhere. Hydro is good, but there are only so many rivers you can dam without damaging the ecosystem and there is a finite number of locations. Wave/tidal power is looking good, but it needs to be next to an ocean.
Maybe the 2020's is when we get a reliable and cost-effective way of storing electricity overproduction on a grid scale.
“In 2020, Germany imported all of the hard coal it consumed with 31.8 million tonnes. Its leading coal suppliers were Russia (45.4%), the United States (18.3%) and Australia (12.3%)”
It seems more like Germany's leaders back then were more interested in appearing green.
One key quote is this one:
"The green movement is more interested in reducing energy consumption than in reducing emissions."
Which is of course not going to happen, so it makes little sense to wind down nuclear plants across the country.
The right thing to do would be to recognize the error from 2018 and start powering up those nuclear power plants again.
The whole thing is a facade, the political leadership is insanely corrupt, with Scholz at the center. As long as Germany's industrialists keep getting cheap gas and cheap workforce form the east so their factories can make stuff cheaply, then nothing else matters.
Guess what she suggested Belgium use to replace nuclear? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Russian gas of course! =)
Makes you question if Europe is really able to do anything seriously about the environment.
https://energywatch.com/EnergyNews/Policy___Trading/article1...
Maybe you should have replaced "green movement" with "conservative party" because increasing energy efficiency was one of the things they used to print on their ads.
Oh not this again. American politicians only care about Europe when they want to make profit or surveil its citizens. Trump (or better, his speech writers) were upset that, at the time, Germany banned fracking.